It was the month of September 1994, my grandmother had a fall and went into coma. She was admitted into Indira Gandhi Medical College, Nagpur. One day at about 3.30 in the early morning, there was a huge commotion in the female ward. Relatives of a patient were bashing up the resident doctor in the ward. On enquiring from one of them he told me "he has killed my wife". I asked the doctor as to what had happened. He told me that he had asked the patients relatives to arrange for 2 units of blood as the lady's Heamoglobin count was very low. They could not arrange for donors and hence the transfusion could not be done and the patient passed away due to a cardiac arrest. This incident left a huge impact on me.

Fast forward to 1999. I wanted to buy some furniture for my house. Fermin, my better half, and I had visited a shop "Iron Butterfly" to buy a sofa set. On our earlier visit we could not meet the owner of the shop. On our third visit my wife insisted that I call him on his mobile and ask him to meet us at the showroom. I called up Mr Firoze Shapurji on his cell. He said he can't meet me that day as he was busy searching for a unit of Blood of the Group "O-ve" for a welder who works in his workshop. I immediately told him that I could help him as I was a regular blood donor since my college days and had donated quite a few units of blood during my NCC days and had quite a few voluntory blood donation cards with me. I could exchange a card in any of the blood banks for a unit of blood.

But that was not to be. I visited about 3-4 blood banks in Nagpur but could not get a single unit of blood. Anyhow Mr Shapurji who is quite a well known personality in Nagpur found a donor for the patient. But the patient needed a lot of transfusion. He passed away after 2 days. When I came to know about it. I was quite disturbed.

This incident got me thinking as to what must be happening to patients who go from one city to another city for treatment, where they have no one to help them. What must be happening to patients who suffer from cancer and need a lot of blood transfusion.What must be happening to children who suffer from sickle cell and thallesemia and who need frequent blood transfusions every month.

I told my wife that we had to do something about this. A solution has to be found to solve this problem. But how it could be done we did not know. We resolved that we would surely do something.......

1999 was the year of the dotcom era. Everybody and anybody was launching a website everyday. I was just beginning to use the internet to send mails to my cousin in Canada. In those days we had to pay Rs 100/- per hour for internet access from a cafe. One day I was checking my mails on www.hotmail.com. And suddenly I realised that I could use the power of the internet to save lives. I would make a website which would be a link between a patient and the donors. I call it the "Eureka" moment. Indianblooddonors.com was born. At that moment I did not know what I was getting into. As I did not know head or tail of how a website is made, what a domain name was, nor did I know what a hosting company is. I was obsessed with making a website which I was sure would save many lives.

We started with buying our first computer which was a second hand one for Rs 12,500. I asked my cousin in Canada to book the domain. A friend of our who was in the business of making website offered to make a website at a discount.I decided to launch my site on the 20th of March 2000. I gave an advertisement in the local papers it was the first and last ad I ever gave in the media. I was very happy and was waiting for thousands of donors to register on the first day itself. But I was in for an unpleasant surprise. I did not get a single registration on the site. I started having my doubts whether the website would every work. I did not give up. I requested my friends to register and asked them to send mails to their friends and spread the word about the site.

I started to contact Hospitals, Blood Banks to promote my site. Some of them banged down the phone on me. I felt quite humiliated. I wrote to some big names in the country promoting blood donation and asked them to mentor me. They never wrote back. I spoke to some known doctors who told me that this concept would never work. They told me why would people help unknown people.

I started writing to big portals of the country to give me a link "Be a Blood Donor" on their site , I begged of them. They did not oblige. Then on 26 January 2001 I got up in the morning and was having my morning cuppa , I switched on the TV to watch the news and saw the NEWS FLASH about the Gujarat Earthquake. Just then my wife Fermin walked in back from school after the Flag Hoisting ceremony. She immediately called up her parents in Ahmedabad to enquire about their safety. We got first hand information about the destruction in Ahmedabad and also about the number of lives lost and injured. It immediately struck me that lots of blood will be needed for the injured. I immediately called up ZEE NEWS in New Delhi and asked them to put up a scroll on their TV "Be a Blood Donor on www.indianblooddonors.com ". They put up the scroll and slowly from about 400 donors we had about 3500 donors registered on the site from all over the country. We then came to know from one of our Pune Donors after a few days that quite a few of them were contacted to donate blood for the Earthquake victims who were brought in from Bhuj to AFMC pune.

At this juncture i would like to acknowledge the support of the Print/Electronic media who have supported us a lot. The first big write up about our site was done by "Outlook Magazine" by Charubala Annuncio in their section "Making a Difference". Then BBC World called up and wanted to do a profile in their programme "IT India Tomorrow ", followed by Readers Digest and so on.

Slowly, I ran into a financial crunch as the working of the website was entirely funded out of our own pockets. Some people came up with the idea that I should charge some money from the patients who were using the services of our site. From day one I wanted the services of the site to be free to the patients. Some asked me to make this an NGO so that I could get donations. I wanted my system to work well first. I would then form an organisation. As of today we have not formed any sort of organisation, we are planning to do so. Then one day out of the blue when I was in a big cash crunch and I did not know how I would pay my Phone bills, internet bills and hosting bills. I got an envelope in my mail box with a Cheque of Rs 1,001 /-. It was addressd to me , with a small note written on it. It was from a Lawyer practising in the Supreme Court in New Delhi. I am sorry i have forgotten the name of the gentleman. I was then contacted by a group of youngsters (Indians ) in the US who were working , studying. They had formed a small organisation "Ekjut" . They contributed 50$ every month to Ekjut and supported small causes in India. They sponsored my telephone bills for the next 3 months and also publicity material (Stickers). Slowly I started getting support from people from different walks of life.

In December 2003 I was contacted by a gentelmen name Gnanasekaran from Chennai. He was running an outfit known as Smaple Solutions. They were into making IVRS (Interactive Voice Response System). He wanted to sell me a solution wherein patient who needed blood donors could call up a number and get the names and telephone numbers of blood donors. His take was that everybody could not access the net but a phone could be used by anybody. We tested the solution Gnani has made, but things did not work out. Instead of selling the solution to us. Gnani became the first volunteer for Indianblooddonors.com. He started writing the code for the site and maintained the site. We went to Chennai to meet up with Gnani. Gnani was a registered donor on our site with a rare blood group. He worked on Indianblooddonors.com from December 2003 to April 2005.Gnani was planning to leave for the UAE to take up a job there. I was quite apprehensive as to who would look after the maintenance of the site.

In May 2005 I got a mail from Mr Ramesh Sannareddy asking me what was the expenditure for my monthly internet expenditure. I wrote back to him. He told me that he would like to sponsor my monthly internet bills. Ramesh then told me something which would change the way indianblooddonors.com worked. He told me that our database was being misutilised by network marketing companies, insurance companies for selling their products. He himself was contacted by an insurance agent to sell their products. I told Ramesh that I was aware of such a problem and that i wished to revamp the site. But could not do so as my one and only volunteer (Gnani) was leaving the country and would not be able to give quality time. Ramesh told me that he could take care of the coding of the entire site. It is said that when God closes one door he opens up another one for you. I and Ramesh would talk for hours every week and plan out the new site. Our new site was ready and we migrated to the new system on 11th of November 2005 midnight. We send out mailers to our 28500 donors asking them to migrate to the new system. About 1000+ donors migrated to the new system by next day mornng. We were sure that our new system would work quite well.. But new challenges lay ahead....

The new site gave donors complete privacy. Database was not open where unscruplous elements could take a printout and misuse the information. The donor also had the choice of the Hospital/Blood Bank he wished to donte blood, preferably at a place which is close to his place of residence or work. The request for blood donation were routed through us. We would take the request, authenticate it and then send the SMS alerts to the Donors. We would send the request in the ratio of 1:3 meaning for every unit of blood needed we would send out 3 SMS alerts to the donors. We used this system for a year, but at the back of our minds we were knowing that the system was not working as efficiently as we were wanting it to. Then in January 2007 I took a break of 10 days and asked Ramesh to handle the system. He was going to take the requests from the blood donors. He had to authenticate them and then send out the SMS to the donors. What he did in those 10 days was the beginning of a new system which we developed in the next few months. Ramesh used to authenticate the request send the SMS alerts to the donors, he would also give the numbers of the donors to the patients relatives. With this done the coordination between the Donors and the patients was much faster. And the ratio of sending SMS to the donors came down. We implemented this system in the month of February 2007. As we went on changing the system and improving the system Ramesh came up with new statistics for me everyday.

Here I would like to add that whenever I was being interviewed by the media or gave a talk at IIM Ahmedabad or at other places, I was asked 2 questions. Sustainability and use of the internet by the common man. Sustainability meaning how I would generate funds to run the helpline. The other question would be that internet is not accessible by every one. I was working on both these problems .

It is said there where there is a will there is a way. I was thinking about the above problem as to how would the common man access the helpline. One day i was watching a cricket match . In between the match my wife asked me to get some groceries . As i was shopping i wanted to know the score and sent out a SMS "CRIC" to 58888 and immediately got the score. Suddenly i got the idea that i could help the patient who needed blood donors. He just had to send an sms. While i was working on the idea i was visiting www.rediff.com and came across a Dating service via SMS . I decided to merge both these features into my helpline.

We launched the SMS based helpline on 3rd of December 2007. I am happy that we have reached the Masses.

The system started working fine. Relatives of patients visiting the site started using the SMS helpline well. Times of India Nagpur Edition was the first to do a write up on the SMS helpline.Then it was followed up by DNA Mumbai. Somehow the electronic Media got to know about it and IBD was on all the News Channels from NDTV, Zee, Star News, Sahara Samay, ETV etc . A write up was done by The Guardian Weekly a UK Paper.

The SMS system was easy to use . But was format specific. Even a small space between two characters in the SMS would either throw up an error message. Relatives of Patients who got the format right. Sent many sms and pulled more number of donors than required . Suddenly we found many problems in the system. We started getting mails from people that tough they had sent the SMS they were not getting the donors names on thier mobile. There were many technical problem also. We were not getting a feedback from the patients in this system as to which donor had agreed to donate, which donor had not. There was also the issue of Wrong Phone numbers of donors . In a span of less thatn 6 months we wanted to change the system and wanted to disable the SMS based helpline. We were not happy with it.

We wanted to empower the people. We needed to develop a system where the the people could use it and they could maintain it. This was our thought process. It was in July 08 I was taking a stroll and my thought process was on. Suddenly i got and idea that we would give the system which we were using before implementing the SMS helpline to the people and empower them.

In the earlier system patient were posting a request, they would get a blood request id on the final landing page , they would call us with the id , we would authenticate the request and would then send alerts to the blood donors and the patients. Sometime the patients would call us and give us a feedback, many a times we were not getting feedback.

Our idea was to empower the people. We decided to give the above system in the hand of the people. They would use it , they would maintain it. The patients relative would post a request. He would be given the blood request id on his Mobile by sms and also by email. He would then click on a link "Contact Donors" , On entering his request id he would be given one donor name. The patient would then call the donor . Based on the donors feedback the patient would select the feedback from a drop down menu and would give us a feedback. Based on his feedback we would send mails to the donors. For exampl if the patient relative gives a feedback "Donor Phone number Wrong" . A mail would be sent to the donor asking him to update his phone numbers. We would also maintain a history of every donor of what a donor said when a patient contacted him for blood donation.

This system was put in place in the last week of July 08. It is working as per our plans. It needs a bit of fine tuning. We will do it slowly and gradually as we get the feedback from the people who are using it.

We are also happy that 3 G is shortly being introduced in India in August 08. So people will be able to access our website on the Mobile phones also. I feel bad that i had scrapped the SMS system in a span of 6 months. We had put in a lot of effort to put that system in place. Especially Ramesh who had done the Coding.

But then one has to move ahead in life.